CollabCar

Login (Android)
Register (Android)
Events list (Android)
Event detail (Android)
Create event (Android)
Login (IOS)
Register (IOS)
Events list (IOS)
Event detail (IOS)
Create event (IOS)

Inspiration

Keeping in mind the noticeable incline in pollution levels, carpooling has proved to be one of the most effective ways to curb pollution. Carpooling would help decrease fuel usage accounting for a more sustainable form of living. College students often face the brunt of having a lack of mode of transportation at their institutions. Planning to carpool provides a cost-effective and environment-friendly solution for a group of people from the same community to commute from one place to another. CollabCar bridges the realms of sustainable living and cost reduction, thus providing students, faculty, and staff of the same institution an easily accessible mode of conveyance and a great way to network with fellow students!

What it does

CollabCar provides an interactive platform for people from the same institution to carpool when going to the same place/event. The application allows users to register themselves as the host or "carpool-ers" and accordingly create a post about the upcoming event and form groups with fellow users from the same community. Subsequently, users are enabled to join a "group" to get to the said event, in a safe and fun way! CollabCar gets members of the same institution to get to a place safely and make friends along the ride!

How we built it

We built a five-screen cross-platform inclusive application using Flutter for the frontend. We connected our frontend to Firebase cloud database to set up a real-time network between user and server. Additionally, we created components and constants files on Flutter to build a theme in order to provide a seamless user experience.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was fetching real-time data while implementing Firebase onto our front-end. Further technical challenges arise while dealing with null values and other code-safety concerns. Designing a flexible and adaptive UI was definitely a challenge but we kept up with a standard theme with great user experience. Finally, merging conflicts while collaborating on GitHub was a hectic process. All of these challenges were a learning experience and helped us widen our technical skillset.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

HackGT 8 was our first hackathon and our main goal was to expand our individual technical skill-sets. In a short span of time, we managed to learn the fundamentals of Flutter. Considering the complexity of our project, we are particularly proud of accomplishing our tasks under a time crunch. Being rookies in the world of hackathons, we had to brainstorm ideas, design UI, collaborate on GitHub, and multiple other problems for the first time. We were able to collaborate efficiently and learn the necessary tools and frameworks required to build our project.

What we learned

We learned that 36 hours is enough time to build a working app if we work hard and communicate efficiently. Planning out our project was essential in order to understand the flow of screens. We understood that delegating work based on our individual strengths would optimize our efficiency.

What's next for CollabCar

Our focus during this hackathon was limited to implementing a functional application to allow the user to create an event or join one. Additional functionality that could be added in the future includes a Maps Integration of the exact location and messaging service for users in the same group.